Professional Website Designer

As the owner of an advertising agency that has been making websites since 1995 we have heard so many stories from our clients about what went wrong with the previous website designer. Here is the problem as I see it. If you go to the grocery store to buy strawberries it is a very simple process. You can pick up the box of strawberries and you can look at them and smell them. You know exactly what you are getting. When you give someone a deposit check to have a website made you have purchased a promise. Then you wait and hope it will look great and you hope that the functions of the website will all work properly.

There are a few things to look for when hiring professional website designers. The first thing to consider is why you are hiring a professional website designer to begin with. You may be starting a new business or you want to upgrade your website so that it will have a better look, more functions or both. For many business owners the success of their business is tied to the professional look of their website and the ability to be found when people search for what their business does. For example if you search for "Full service advertising agency" you will find Ad-Excellence.Com. We get big part of our business from people who are looking for an ad agency on the Internet.

Here is our suggested list of what to look for in a website designer.

1. Hire an ad agency not a website design company or an individual.
2. View live examples of websites.
3. Contact owners of websites made by the design firm.
4. Find out if professional copy-writing is included or if you are expected to provide all the text.
5. Don't shop by price.
6. Look for proof that they get their websites to rank well in search engines.

We suggest advertising agencies are going to be better than hiring a website design firm or an individual for more than one reason. An individual is likely to be good at design or programming but not both. It is that right brain, left brain problem so that it is just not likely that you'll find someone who can make a beautiful website with great programming. A company with an office is easy to find again when you need to contact them. Individuals sometimes leave town, get sick or just take deposits and never get the websites done. The right website design firm will have talented designers, skilled programmers and a great copywriter with a degree in journalism. In our company for example there is always going to be a minimum of four highly skilled professionals working on every website. We have a copywriter with a masters degree in journalism and she will be writing your text. Our graphic artists are the ones who people generally consider the website designers but they only create the design. Our highly skilled graphic artists all have a minimum of a four year degree in order to be able to work here. Our programmers will take the design and text and create all of the programming needed to make your website work. The programmers working for Ad Excellence usually have a six year degree in programming. Lastly the SEO or search engine optimization pro is the last person to work on your website. Although some companies claim to be cheaper than us none can show any proof that they are better than us.

An ad agency will be better than a website design firm because you'll want all of your marketing materials to have a consistent look and feel. Ad agencies will consider this for branding reasons but website designers rarely give it a thought and don't have print design experience.

We realize that you have to pay a fee to have a website made and we are the ones collecting the fee so it seems easy for us to say, "Don't shop for a website by price". We only mean to say that a bargain isn't a bargain if you later have to pay someone else to have the job done over so consider everything, not just the price. Nobody likes to waste money on anything so you will want to pay a reasonable price for the website project but the cost of the website is not the most important consideration.

Think of it this way; if you needed open heart surgery to save your life would you look for the cheapest doctor?

When your life depends upon it you want the best not the cheapest. The life of your business depends upon having a great website so look for the best website design company not the cheapest. A bargain website that doesn't look fantastic will turn away clients costing you a fortune in lost business. A cheap website that can't be found when people search for what you do will also cost a fortune in missed opportunities.

If a company is hired by a large company to do some professional website design work then the chances are good that the large company had committee meetings and interviewed plenty of applicants before settling on one. So although someone else may have done a lot of the research for you hiring a website designer or an advertising agency based upon who their clients are is not a guarantee that you'll like the work they do for you but it is an indication of trustworthiness and reliability.

We are the only outside vendor to ever make websites for The Miami Herald and we have made several for them. The biggest website we made for this newspaper publisher is their Rewards or Customer Loyalty website. If The Miami Herald hired us does that mean that you should? It is a nice feather in our cap but they had specific needs which may be simpler or more complex than your needs. The best way to find out is with a face to face meeting. If that isn't possible then at the very least a phone call to go over the details.

Be sure the company designing your new website is competent to handle all of the requirements that you have. A company that does beautiful design work but has little experience in ecommerce websites will be learning at your expense. You don't want to pay for their on the job training.

You might also want to consider the benifits of a database driven website or a customer relationship management function built into your website. Please see the videos below for examples of database driven website options.  The first video below is the most important one.  This video shows that when you hire the right website designer you get a website that people will find in the search engines.  A cheaper website that nobody can find is no bargain at all. 

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